Smart antennas (also known as adaptive array antennas, a multi-antenna system, multiple antennas, and multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antennas) may be used with wireless communication devices, such as base stations (also referred to as “Node Bs”). Smart antennas are antenna arrays with smart signal processing algorithms that are used to identify spatial signal information (e.g., a direction of arrival (DOA) of the signal) and to calculate beamforming vectors. The beamforming vectors are used to track and locate an antenna beam associated with a target user equipment (e.g., a mobile telephone).
Smart antennas have two main functions—DOA estimation and beamforming. During generation of a beam, each smart antenna uses weights for beamforming. Different antennas may have different weights and may transmit different data. Current time division-synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA) based devices (e.g., base stations) may include four to eight antennas. Each antenna is connected, via a cable, to the base station (e.g., a radio base station (RBS) or a remote radio unit (RRU)). In such an arrangement, if a cable is connected to an incorrect antenna, an incorrect beam is generated and performance is decreased. However, manually checking incorrect or erroneous connections is time consuming and tedious.
One proposed solution to this problem is to automatically detect an incorrect connection between an antenna port and a RF path. In the proposed solution, an uplink-received signal is collected and a channel is detected. The channel can be detected with the uplink-received signal. The uplink-received signal is used to detect a maximum energy by traveling in all possible orders of an antenna array vector and in all possible spatial directions. Specifically, the uplink-received signal is used to calculate a correlation matrix, and all possible arrangements of an antenna weighting factor sequence are traversed to obtain a weighting factor matrix. After searching through all directions of space, a maximum value of different weighting factor arrangements is determined, and an arrangement corresponding to the maximum received power is chosen to be a current connection order. However, the proposed solution requires an uplink signal, which means that the proposed solution can only be used with an operational wireless communication network or with extra equipment that generates the uplink signal.